Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia - Jurusan Antropologi ...

CULTURAL RELATIONS AND THE NEW RICH 13
which avoided colonisation, the state was the domain of a bureaucratic nobility
recruited not principally through birthright but through the formal conferment of
noble title (Skinner 1957:149). With the rapid expansion of the Thai state
bureaucracy in the early part of the twentieth century, it too served as the major
vehicle for status mobility and middle-class formation during the era of colonialism
(Riggs 1966). Likewise ‘modern education’ became an increasingly important
credential in gaining a position in the state bureaucracy (Pasuk and Baker 1995:
236).
In all of these developments, as in the pre-colonial era, independent merchants,
artisans and, by now, the growing number of entrepreneurial capitalists continued
to be excluded from the realm of high social status and respectability. While some
were rewarded, it was not through their money-making, as such, but through
marital alliance, formal education or conferment of noble title, as in the case of
Thailand and Malaya (Fairbank 1994:180; Shamsul), a pattern similar to that of
industrialising Europe (Neale 1985:73; Pilbeam 1990:14). That these economic
operators often sought prestige within a status order dominated by ideas of noble
birth, cultural refinement or scholarship probably indicated not only their
opportunism, but also something of their acceptance of and deference towards this
order. That increasing numbers of high-state officials or powerful landlords, with
noble or quasi-noble status, were entering the world of commerce directly, or
through personal alliances, suggested something of the economic transformation
that was taking place around them, and anticipated later developments in which
the state became a major vehicle for private investment and capital accumulation
(Deyo 1987; Hewison et al. 1993).
Many of the cultural tensions and differences surrounding the organisation of
privilege, power and economic activity in many Asian societies were also played
out through ethnic conflict and the politics of nationalism. In most Southeast Asian
countries, status relations between nobilities-cum-bureaucratic elites and merchants
also found expression as an ethnic relationship between indigenous populations
and Chinese migrant communities. That these relations have oscillated between
open hostility, strategic alliance and acculturation reflects something of the
structural tensions between merchants and nobles. The widespread perception
among indigenous populations in Indonesia, Malaya and the Philippines that the
ethnic Chinese were foreign economic opportunists enriching themselves at the
expense of local people, was also fostered by the presence of colonial powers,
whose commercial interests or needs seemed to favour the Chinese (Wickberg
1965:6, 63; Osborne 1985:109). The British presence in peninsular Malaya, initially
built around the mainly Chinese populated straits settlements and the importation
of Chinese and Indian workers and managers for colonial business ventures, was
particularly influential in establishing ethnicity as a basis of identification and
conflict (Shamsul, Smith).
In such situations, rising nationalist sentiment, generated through the experience
of colonial rule, took on the form of ethno-nationalism (Shamsul, Heryanto). As
such, it was directed not only at the institutions of colonialism, but at what were